"Rethink your life as if you are the one who creates it. Because you are. Don't let anyone else tell you otherwise." - Collin Lam, 2022
ABOUT COLLIN LAM 林炬賢
Born on December 13, 1971, Mr. Collin Lam (林炬賢 先生) was an international strategies expert who has worked with business founders and CEOs of top multinationals as their Global Head of People for more than 20 years, before becoming a professional business investor across continents.
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​Started his career as a management trainee initially when he was 21 years old, building new buildings and commissioning new hospitals that saved thousands, during when Collin has established his reputation of being "resourceful, dedicated and remarkably capable".
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At the age of 29, Collin has become the General Manager of a global defense & infrastructure company - the Serco Group plc., handling its business operations in Hong Kong, Singapore and Mainland China. In less than 9 years, he was headhunted further to be the Group Director and Chief Officer for several global corporations (including Ralph Lauren, FANCL and the PURE Group) to lead teams of over 2,500 people for these multi-billion-dollars businesses in most of the Asia Pacific countries like Mainland China, Singapore, Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Thailand, Malaysia, Cambodia, Sri Lanka and Vietnam.
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In 2023, after completing an Initial Public Offering project for a global e-commerce business in Hong Kong, Collin moved on to a new direction and became a professional businesses investor, exploring opportunities globally.
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Academically, Collin graduated from renowned universities in Hong Kong, Australia and the United States of America. Collin graduated from the number one college in Hong Kong – Queen’s College – before admitting to the top universities in the world : the Hong Kong University of Science & Technology in 1991, the Adelaide University (formerly known as University of South Australia) in 2001 and Stanford University of the United States of America in 2011, where he obtained post graduate qualifications in international business, technology and corporate leadership. ​​
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Up till today, Collin Lam resides in Australia while travelling extensively around the globe.
EARLY years
Collin was raised by his mother, who was the sole breadwinner for his family of six people, including his father who was ill for over 15 years. His parent could not pay the rent for the apartments and had to move almost every year and had to live in worst places since Collin was born. He had to live in places with leaking roofs, rats, centipedes, bats, cockroaches, worms & weird insects of all sorts everywhere in the tiny little apartment.
That was not a pleasant environment for a child to grow up in, but that's also the motivation for Collin to excel in life in his future years.
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When Collin was around 10 years old, his father developed a mental illness so bad that everyday was like a living hell to everyone in the family, worst to Collin as the youngest kid in the family. At the end, at the tip of his father's schizophrenic outburst , Collin had to call the police to take his father to the hospital because he has became physically aggressive. As a kid, it was one of the very worst memories he had.
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Although Collin didn’t have any role model to learn from when he was young (and by that time the world didn’t have online resources to learn from), young ones could only learn from either schools or their parents. However, given Collin's circumstances, who could he learn from?
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​​​​Then one day, a crazy idea came to his mind which proved to be one of the most important turning point for his life. "How about I avoid doing what my parents have done and only do things they didn’t?" he thought.
Since then, Collin started to look outside to find someone who had achieved amazing things in the areas he had admiration in, whoever they were, and only learnt from the best at those fields. It was the guiding principle that led to Collin’s future breakthrough - unlearning and learning things from a very different perspective.​​​​​
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Besides learning from others, Collin studied very hard even though he didn’t have the place to sit and study. His school library closed during the weekends, and his home was too small to even have a quiet corner to sit. As a result, Collin used to go to the backstairs of one commercial building during the weekends to study from early morning till late, because the back staircase were always lit with the fluorescent lights, extremely quiet and seldom had someone walked over there to disturb him.
​As quoted by Collin in his interview on leadership topic in December 2024, “I still remember once a security guard of that building patrolled the backstairs and saw me studying. Instead of asking me to leave, he looked at me and my books on the staircases, he seemed to understand what I was just studying and just left without saying a word.​ Up till today, I still remember him and really want to thank him for his kindness.”​​
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The early years were by no means great for Collin, but it formed the direction of how he would navigate his life throughout the years that follow that led him to achieve the impossibles and became a successful leader both in business and in life.